Baker woman is baking bread

I have always loved to cook food. Baking on the other hand never appealed to me in the same way. I have no other explanation than that I imagined baking recipes so strict. When I cook, I like to take inspiration from recipes, but I never read the amounts of ingredients, but merely shoot off of the hip. This, I imagined was impossible with baking and therefore I considered it too complicated. Stupid, yes, I know...

A few weeks ago I took the bull by the horn all of a sudden. We had talked so much about making our own healthy bread from whole-grain flour and with seeds and nuts inside. The reason was that I found this amazing Tupperware baking bowl, laying around deep inside of a cupboard, and I decided to try it out. I shot from the hip with whole-wheat and whole-rye flour and mixed in linseeds, sunflower seeds and crushed walnuts. Then I made a few cups of lukewarm milk with some honey and yoghurt, in which I dissolved the yeast. I mixed the wet with the dry, kneaded into a good consistency and let it leaven for half an hour in the baking bowl. When it had grown for a while I topped it with some whipped egg and pumpkin seeds and threw it in the oven for about 40 minutes in a temperature also shot from the hip - since we only have numbers and not temperature on the button on the stove.

What came out from the oven was pure love - a juicy and heavy bread that keeps fresh for days, in case we don't finish it sooner than that. Most of the time we do! After this first success I have kept on providing us with a home-baked bread on a regular basis, and although I cannot say exactly what it is that I am improving, each bread gets better than the previous one. One day I even used the whey that was left after my home-made labaneh, and that made me feel like a genuine housewife. I even save the whey from every batch of labaneh in the freezer, to collect for making a batch of ricotta cheese when I have the right amount. I have become slightly obsessed with producing refined foods from scratch instead of buying fabricated ones from the supermarket, which I know most of the time are stuffed with food additives and sugars. Most things we buy ready-made are local products from places we know provide good quality. I want to make our own bread and some dairy products, and I never buy ready-made sauces or things like that. Yoram is as interested in these things as I am and we are definitely encouraging each other when it comes to our family food culture. Let us see how far we can take it.